AnyPlace Platform Website

Summary: The AnyPlace platform provides a flexible, affordable way for historical and cultural institutions to share place-based interpretive projects online. Place is an important touchstone for memory, history, and culture. By exploring the memories and records of place, we educate the public and promote and protect significant spaces, sites, and stories that hold meaning.

Adapted from the codebase originally developed for PhilaPlace (www.philaplace.org), the AnyPlace platform allows organizations to establish their own interpretive website, using their own brand and visual aesthetic, and engaging visitors in exploration of their places, topics, curation, and media.

Each organization’s instance of AnyPlace would provide its visitors with a rich online tool for browsing place-based stories, images and videos on a map, by topic, or as collections. Visitors could alter content geographically and thematically, take virtual tours, save favorite places, print Google directions and submit their own stories and media for consideration.

The design challenge was to create an aesthetic that had enough of a “brand” to promote as a branded product, but not so much that potential clients felt that they would not be able to break-out of the AnyPlace look. The result is an exercise in subtlety and minimalism.